Cultura y Letras Cubanas en el Siglo XXI

Araceli Tinajero, City College of New York and The Graduate Center, CUNY

Odette Casaymayor Cisneros, University of Connecticut – Storrs

Rachel Price, Princeton University

Moderator:Mauricio Font, Bildner Center and the Graduate Center, CUNY

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 opened new debate over the processes that would transform Cuba’s situation. Ever since, there have been a series of discussions that center on the changes taking place in the cultural, artistic, economic, social, demographic, political, and structural environments in Cuba. Intellectuals from different academic disciplines (art, anthropology, history, literary studies, and sociology) develop such ideas in the essays that comprise this book, which covers a variety of themes, including comic books, Cuban art photography, film, rock, historiographies, and the presence of the former Soviet Union in Cuba, as well as literature.

Araceli Tinajero is a Mexican scholar and the author of Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano, El lector de tabaquería, El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader. She is presently co-editing Technology and Culture in Twentieth Century Mexico. Her Kokoro, el Japón en mi corazón is forthcoming.

Odette Casamayor Cisneros is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Literature and Culture at the University of Connecticut/Storrs. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the University of Havana, and obtained her PhD in Arts and Literature from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), París. In 2003, her essay, “Negros de papel. Algunas apariciones del negro en la narrativa cubana después de 1959,” won the Juan Rulfo literary essay award, which is granted by Radio France Internationale. She is currently writing a book about Post-Soviet Cuban literature and ethics.

Rachel Price works on Latin American, circum-Atlantic and particularly Cuban literature and culture; media and literature; and comparative imperialisms. She is currently completing a book tentatively entitled The Object of the Atlantic, about the emergence of a post-romantic aesthetics of concretude in Brazil, Cuba, and Spain in the wake of changes in empire and capitalism in the 1890s. She has published articles on José Martí’s haunting of Cuban Republican literature; on concrete and post-concrete art and poetry in Brazil; and on Spanish emblem books’ connection to empire.